An audit released yesterday by City Comptroller William
C. Thompson Jr. said that staffing levels in the city's
Department of Records and Information Services had been
cut sharply in the last decade, although it said the department
was still able to manage and safeguard the city's records
adequately.

Normally, the city's records and historical archives
attract little attention. But the Records Department has
been in the spotlight since former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani
sent his papers to a warehouse in Queens to be privately
archived. That move led to a debate on whether any mayor
should be allowed to turn over papers from his administration
to a private company.

The report by the comptroller says that many of those
papers, once catalogued, began to be turned over earlier
this year to the municipal archives division of the department.

Aides to Mr. Giuliani have said that the private transfer
of the public papers, through a nonprofit center controlled
by Mr. Giuliani, was intended to produce swifter processing
and give the public speedier access to the material than
the years it typically takes to catalog mayoral documents.
They argued that the city was still
working on archiving the papers from the administration
of David N. Dinkins, which ended in 1993.

In the report, Mr. Thompson's office took no position
on the transfer of the Giuliani administration's papers
to a private company. But it did describe that action
as "an unprecedented one and is clearly a means by
which the Giuliani Center was able to circumvent established
protocols and take exclusive control of the Giuliani
papers."

The comptroller's audit states that the number of workers
in the records agency dropped 47 percent, to 55 workers,
in the fiscal year that ended in June 2001, from 104 employees
10 fiscal years earlier. In that same period, the department's
budget decreased by 7 percent, to $4.2 million, the report
states.

The report also states that the comptroller's office
found limited storage capacity in the buildings where
city records were warehoused. And it said that the department's
site in Brooklyn suffered from "some environmental
and security concerns that could pose a threat to records
stored there."

Earlier this week, the City Council passed a measure
compelling mayors, including Michael R. Bloomberg, to
keep public records in the public domain. Officials in
the Bloomberg administration said the mayor was likely
to sign that bill.